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Thursday, 30 April 2009

“Failed to play test tone”, no sound on Vista – troubleshooting

Has your Windows Vista computer suddenly gone silent - no sound comes out of your speakers, “Failed to play test tone” appears when you try to test your speakers? (e.g. after upgrading to Vista). Well, you’re not alone.

If you’ve suddenly lost sound / audio support on your Vista PC, this post contains a step by step pictorial guide for non-techies on some troubleshooting tips to try.

Different issues could give rise to this annoyance, e.g. a new program that was installed. So this post will help you only if your problem was caused by certain specific issues – but I hope the troubleshooting ideas suggested below will help you figure out why your system’s sound has stopped working and, more importantly, help find the solution to fix it!

A. How to restart Windows Audio after “Failed to play test tone”

This is the solution which finally worked for me to restore audio output on my computer, in case this tip helps someone else. I also found that the fix wasn’t just temporary for me – it’s survived several restarts / reboots since.

How to try this fix: go to the start menu and in the “Start Search” box type in the following (then hit Enter): services.msc

In the Services window that opens up, scroll down till you find “Windows Audio”. Leftclick once on it to highlight it, then rightclick on it and choose Restart:

Then close the Services window and check to see if your sound is now working again.

B. Still no sound coming out? - other troubleshooting things to try

Some preliminary things to check if no sound is coming out of your computer speakers (yes, some of them are obvious, but often it’s the obvious things that can catch people out, including me!).

1. Volume control – muted?

Did someone mute your speaker volume?

To check this, leftclick the speaker icon in your system tray (bottom right hand of the screen) and check to see if your Speakers have Mute on (red line through it, see below).

If so, just click that icon and then the Mute icon (outlined in red below) to turn mute off! And obviously you should also check the volume slider to see that the volume level is high enough.

2. How to get to the Sound window

Most things to check are in the Sound window.

How to open the Sound window? There are several ways to get this up.

Absolute quickest way: click the Start menu (bottom left Windows icon), in the Start Search box type the following then hit Enter: mmsys.cpl

Alternative way to get to the Sound window: Go to the Start menu, type in the Start Search box: soundThen doubleclick the “Sound” item (with the speaker icon against it).

Visual mouse way: rightclick on the volume / speaker icon in your system tray, bottom right (outlined in red below) and pick Playback Devices to bring up the Sound window:

3. Are your speakers the selected sound output device?

Maybe the sound somehow got set to come out of your headphones instead of your speakers.

To check this, in the Sound window go to the Playback tab.

In the Playback tab, is there a tick (white on green circle) against your speakers? If not, click to select Speakers and then click Set Default and OK.

4. Try to play the test tone; changing default format

To try playing the test tone, in the Sound window’s Playback tab highlight Speakers by leftclicking once on it, then click Properties:

In the Properties window, go to the Advanced tab and then click on the Test button outlined in red below, to see if you can hear the test tone (if you don’t hear it try my solution at A above!):

Some people got the “no more sound” problem after changing the Default format in the dropdown list to the left of the Test button in the pic above.

If you did that, try checking that dropdown list. Are there duplicate entries? If so, try the Microsoft hotfix. Or just try changing the format back to what it was, and that may be enough to fix it (possibly after a reboot).

5. Sound effects?

Another fix which seems to have worked for some people (it didn’t for me) is to do with sound effects.

While you’re in the Speaker prosperties (see 4 above as to how to get there), go to the Enhancements tab.

Sound levels. Should be the same as B.1, but while in Speaker Properties you could also go to the Levels tab and double check that the sliders are at the right levels to be heard, i.e. it’s not just that the sound output for your speakers is too quiet or has been set to 0. If so, just move the slider to a better position (like 98) and OK it:

6. Try the Windows sounds too

Back in the Sound window, you should also check to see if the system sounds are audible even if e.g. MP3s or streaming audio from webpages etc can’t be heard.

If so, that’s a clue that maybe it’s a particular program like Windows Media Player that’s up the spout, rather than Windows generally, and you’ll have to find a solution for that particular program.

To check this, go to the Sounds tab and click on one of the items that has a speaker icon against it (e.g. Asterisk) then click the Test button

7. Try several other applications and devices

Is sound missing only in one application (e.g. Windows Media Player), or everything? Try several programs e.g. if you can’t hear an MP3, trying playing it using different applications.

If it’s only inaudible in one program, that suggests it’s a problem with that one bit of software and you may need to reinstall it or try other fixes specific to that program.

For instance, egg on face time here but after a YouTube change a few months ago I lost all sound. Then found that it was only because the YouTube volume level slider (see below) had somehow defaulted to zero on my system! When I moved the slider up, that fixed it.

Also, try selecting other audio devices (e.g. headset), see 3 above, and if there’s sound from those but not your speakers, then that points to an issue with your speakers, whether hardware (they’re bust!) or software (drivers etc). To check the hardware issue, obviously you can try connecting the speakers e.g. to the headphones or line out of your MP3 player / iPod, and see if any sound comes out of the speakers then.

8. Update your sound card drivers

Worse comes to comes, try updating your sound card drivers (how is beyond the scope of this blog post as it depends on your sound card).

Most people seem to suggest this as the first thing to try, but for me it would be the last as the others are easier to do and less drastic, and may well work.

9. Desperation time?

While searching for a solution to my own issue I found somesuggestions that deleting a particular registry entry and then rebooting might work (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Ole\DefaultAccessPermission). But I’ve not tried it so if you’re desperate enough to have a go, it’s entirely at your own risk and you should make sure you backup your registry first just in case it makes things worse!

73 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Thank you SO MUCH for this post. I have sometimes had to reboot to get audio back in the middle of a session. I am not sure what program is knocking it out, but your services.msc "Restart" option did the trick on my computer. Thanks again.

I found this, after searching for months, when I went into my sound menu and tried to play a tone. "Failed to play test tone" finally gave me detailed enough terms to successfully find you in a Google search.

Thank you for making me feel like an idiot. No, seriously. I'm pretty computer savvy, I built my own machine and just today lost sound. Something as simple as restarting the Windows Audio service never even dawned on me... but it did the trick. So I sincerely thank you. As of today please consider yourself a geek god. I couldn't live without my music and you've given it back to me./bow

Hey thanks for the pictorial on Sound. I have bit the bullet and posted what helped me restore sound on Vista Laptop by installing sound drivers. Check out Vista, No Sound Problem Solved by Reinstalling Sound Drivers post. Of course I agree with you... your mileage may vary, you may want to change a thing here or there depending on the manufacturer of the computer and on the driver manufacturer. But people may get a general idea!

unfortunately none of these solutions seemed to work for me. not even the 'desperate one' :(

I fixed the problem by using vista's system restore to restore the computer to a point before the sound disappeared. judging from this i am pretty sure that it was a problem with the sound drivers and that uninstalling and reinstalling them completely might help.

I have the problem with the sound but I cannot get to properties in the sound window and the default button is grayed out so can't click on that.. when i do click on properties I get this message - windows host process rundll32 has stopped working

I searched all over and tried so many things. Finally I came across this site and it fixed my problem. The two things that helped me restore the sound on my PC were, "Restarting the Windows Audio Service" and "Disabling the Enhancement features". Thanks so much!

Thanks a lot for your fantastic help page. Logitech installed an update and change the sound quality (problem 4 on your page). I would have never figure that out without your clear explanations. Thanks again.

Thanks for trying to help us. It didn't work for me at all. Says Compact Flash with an exclamation point, I tried updating etc. I don't have 100 dollars to ask Microsoft for help online so I guess the computer's shot. Says Code 10, cannot start.

Oh thank god for your article, I was just about to start panicking when I came across this and fixed the problem. Probably saved me lots of money from having to bring it in to some tech support place, thanks so much!

Woo! Thank you so much! Solution 1 worked fine for me, would you believe I hadn't even noticed that my sound had crapped out (as I use laptop in work so usually have sound on mute) until I tried to accept a call on Skype. Luckily your blog popped up as the first result on Google and I was fixed in under a minute.

deleting the (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Ole\DefaultAccessPermission)

DID THE TRICK FOR ME. seems odd but it was the only thing I Hadn't yet tried.If anyone can explain why this workedI am all ears , To me, deleting a key seems counter-intuitive for the purpose on "ENABLING" a service.

Thanks so much! Speakers sometimes just stop working when I'm playing music and while restarting fixes them it is rather annoying to have to do, but restarting just the speakers from the services window was just the solution I was looking for! Thanks :)

Fucking thank you for the first solution, I literally checked everything else, even services. Don't know how I skipped Windows Audio for the past year this problem has been randomly occurring, lol. Thanks a lot OP, no more restarting my computer for me.

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